JAMIE’S SPECIALIZED TURBO KENEVO SL COMP
MONTH 12: Jamie milks his new e-bike analogy for an entire column...
£7,400 • 29in • specialized.com
Full fat for cereal, semiskimmed for tea, and skimmed for when your mum comes over and wants an earl grey. That’s how it goes in our family, blue, green and red top milk all deserve a place in the fridge, and while I’m sure you’d love to hear more about the domestic details of the Darlow house, you’re probably wondering what the hell all this has to do with mountain biking.
Well, this is how I tend to think about bikes now that e-bikes are here. E-bikes with all the power are of course full fat, regular bio bikes are fat-free, and the new breed of lightweight e-bikes are semiskimmed. My Kenevo SL fits in here, the kind of bike that does everything well.
Lately though, that analogy has started to turn sour thanks to newcomers like the Trek Fuel EXE. If my Kenevo SL is semi-skimmed with 35Nm of torque, what does that make the EXE with 50Nm or the new Fazua Ride 60 motor with nearly double that of the SL? They’re both nearly as powerful as the original Shimano E8000 motor that dished out 70Nm.
Come to think of it, the difference between today’s full fat motors is just as pronounced, Bosch, Shimano, Yamaha and Specialized all sit around 85-90Nm, while the Rocky Mountain Dyname
3.0 motor produces 108Nm torque. That’s a huge difference, greater than that between the Fazua Ride 60 and the full-fat bikes. My point is that pretty soon we’re going to have to stop thinking about e-bikes in power band categories because there will be too many to make it useful. So, like Waitrose, we’ll soon have to abandon our coloured coded bottle tops and perhaps just call them ‘bikes’.
WHY IT’S HERE Diet e-bikes, the best or worst of both worlds?